EXPLAINER: What is the IHRA antisemitism definition, and why is it contested?
The Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, released a report on 30 October that makes one thing a central priority: embedding the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism across government, schools and universities. The Jewish Council of Australia called the report “Orwellian” and said that push threatens free speech and academic freedom. Behind the row sits a question most people never have cause to ask: how do you define antisemitism, who gets to decide, and what follows once a government writes one definition into its rules? Here is what the IHRA definition is, why it’s fought over, and what the alternatives are.
A definition built for one job
The text now at the centre of the argument was not written to be a law. Kenneth Stern drafted it in 2004–05 for the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, so that agencies across Europe would count antisemitic incidents in a consistent way and their data could be compared. The IHRA adopted it in 2016, and still describes it as “non-legally binding”. Much of the current dispute is about using a monitoring tool for a job it wasn’t built for.
Its core is a single sentence: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” That part is uncontroversial. When governments and institutions say they’ve adopted “the IHRA definition”, though, they usually mean the core sentence plus eleven contemporary examples attached to it, and the examples are where the trouble is.
The examples, and the Israel question
Seven of the eleven examples concern Israel: denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, “e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”; applying double standards by requiring of Israel behaviour not expected of any other democratic nation; comparing contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis; holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel; accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel than to their own country; claiming Israel invented or exaggerated the Holocaust; and using classic antisemitic imagery, such as blood libel, to characterise Israel.
Two framing points sit around those examples, and the definition’s defenders lean on both of these. The examples are expressly illustrative and context-dependent: conduct that “could, taking into account the overall context” be antisemitic, not a fixed list of banned statements. And the definition states plainly that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
Why it’s contested
The sharpest objection is that embedding the definition chills legitimate criticism of Israel. Taken as a flat claim about the text, that’s wrong: the definition exempts ordinary criticism, frames its examples as context-dependent, and isn’t a law that anyone is prosecuted under. If the argument were only about what the words actually say, it would be a weak one.
The real concern is about what happens when the definition stops being a guide and starts being a rule. Seven of its eleven examples centre on Israel, and several — the “racist endeavor” example, the double-standards example, the Nazi-comparison example — describe arguments that recur in mainstream pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist advocacy. Left as a non-binding monitoring tool, the problem remains abstract. Written into university codes, funding conditions, employment rules or the terms of an inquiry, the Israel examples start doing regulatory work: it's conduct an institution must now watch for, and speech a student society or an academic has to weigh before holding an event.
The most striking witness for that concern is the definition’s own author. Kenneth Stern says he wrote the text to track data, not to serve as a campus hate-speech code, and has repeatedly warned that using it that way chills legitimate speech and is “being distorted and used to silence anti-Israel critics”. He made that argument about the United States, where the Trump administration built the definition into executive orders, but the mechanism he describes, a monitoring tool repurposed as an enforcement standard, is the one Segal’s report proposes to extend here. Stern still backs the definition for the data job it was built for, and opposes its use to police speech.
The case for it
The definition’s defenders are not entirely without a case. It is by far the most widely adopted definition: dozens of governments use it, Australia’s among them since the Morrison government embraced it in 2021, and most mainstream Jewish communal bodies, including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, support it. Their argument is that a real strand of contemporary antisemitism does travel under anti-Zionist language — that “Zionist” is sometimes used as a thin cover for “Jew” — and that a definition which refuses to recognise that leaves a genuine form of hatred unaddressed. Marking the point where anti-Israel rhetoric becomes antisemitism is not the same as banning criticism of Israel, and the exemption for ordinary criticism is there to keep the two apart.
What that case can’t settle on its own is whether the most-adopted definition should also become binding institutional rules. Prevalence isn’t the same as suitability for that job, which is why the quarrel persists even among people who agree antisemitism is real and rising.
The alternatives
The main scholarly alternative is the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, published in 2021 and now signed by more than 400 academics in antisemitism, Jewish and Holocaust studies. Its core definition is tighter: “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)”. It sorts its examples into conduct that can be antisemitic and conduct that isn’t.
The second list is the point of difference. The Declaration states that boycott, divestment and sanctions are “commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest” and “not, in and of themselves, antisemitic”; that it is “not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid”; and that criticism judged excessive or as applying a double standard is “not, in and of itself” antisemitic. On the clear cases it draws the same line IHRA does — classic antisemitic imagery applied to Israel, holding Jews responsible for its conduct, making Jews pass a loyalty test on it — but it carves out the political speech IHRA’s Israel examples leave exposed. It is not a blank cheque: its own authors say it doesn’t claim anti-Zionism can never be antisemitic, and critics argue it is too permissive of anti-Zionist rhetoric. A third definition, the US-focused Nexus Document, takes a similar line in protecting political speech about Israel.
Where Australia stands
Australia has never settled on one definition. The federal government embraced IHRA in 2021. Universities Australia adopted its own definition in February 2025: a separate text, closer to IHRA than to the Jerusalem Declaration, which Segal herself helped develop. It drew fire from both directions. The Australian Historical Association said it “places new limits on scholarly scrutiny and criticism of Israel and Zionism”; some Jewish groups said it didn’t go far enough and preferred IHRA; and the Jewish Council of Australia called it “dangerous and politicised”.
Segal’s October report presses to embed the IHRA version more widely. By the Jewish Council’s account, its proposals reach universities, the arts, public broadcasters and migration, with conditions and oversight attached — which is what turns an abstract argument about wording into a concrete one about funding, employment and who gets to speak at a public institution.
What’s actually at stake
Almost nobody in this debate disputes that antisemitism is real, serious and on the rise, or that it should be defined and countered. The disagreement is narrower than the headlines often suggest: which definition a government should use, and whether a non-binding guide, written two decades ago to address data analysis needs, should be turned into binding rules for universities, funding bodies and the arts. The Jerusalem Declaration is the main attempt to define antisemitism without catching ordinary political argument about Israel in the net. Which definition Australia writes into its institutions is an important choice, and Segal’s new report has reopened the debate.